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B-Tree Locking

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Encyclopedia of Database Systems

Synonyms

B-tree concurrency control; Row-level locking; Key value locking; Key range locking; Lock coupling; Latching; Latch coupling; Crabbing

Definition

B-tree locking controls concurrent searches and updates in B-trees. It separates transactions in order to protect the B-tree contents and it separates threads in order to protect the B-tree data structure. Nowadays, the latter is usually called latching rather than locking.

Historical Background

Bayer and Schkolnick [1] presented multiple locking (latching) protocols for B*-trees (all data records in the leaves, merely separator keys or “reference keys” in upper nodes) that combined high concurrency with deadlock avoidance. Their approach for insertion and deletion is based on deciding during a root-to-leaf traversal whether a node is “safe” from splitting (during an insertion) or merging (during a deletion), and on reserving appropriate locks (latches) for ancestors of unsafe nodes.

Lehman and Yao defined Blink-trees by relaxing...

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Recommended Reading

  1. Bayer R. and Schkolnick M. Concurrency of operations on B-trees. Acta Inf., 9:1–21, 1977.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto, CA, USA

    Goetz Graefe

Authors
  1. Goetz Graefe
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 266 Ferst Drive, 30332-0765, Atlanta, GA, USA

    LING LIU (Professor) (Professor)

  2. Database Research Group David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, N2L 3G1, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. TAMER ÖZSU (Professor and Director, University Research Chair) (Professor and Director, University Research Chair)

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© 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

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Graefe, G. (2009). B-Tree Locking. In: LIU, L., ÖZSU, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_35

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